Fire Weather: A Reader’s Dialogue
It’s probably fair to say that Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast is one of the most important climate change focused books of 2023. Released in May, one month before the wildfire smoke hit Eastern Canada and fires blanketed New York City with heavy smog and suffocating ash. The apocalyptic images of dark red sunsets possibly increased book sales as people wanted to learn about this new uncertain future. In other words, Fire Weather is a very of-the-moment kind of book and will, I think, come to epitomize the decade.
Fire seems deceptively simple. You see flames and it consumes wood and other flammable materials. However, after reading Fire Weather, my understanding of fire has changed on a fundamental level. Vaillant gives two ways of looking at fire. First as a chemical reaction and second as an animated being.
“It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit. This is what the heat is for: to liberate the flammable gases from their solid or liquid prisons by transforming them into vapor. In fire’s world, everything relevant is breathing, emitting, vaporizing, volatile — not just the air, but the trees, the neighborhood, the house, the Formica countertop, the bag of cat food sitting on it, and, if conditions are favorable enough — hot enough — the cat itself. The higher the temperature, the broader fire’s menu; under the right conditions, even a bulldozer will burn. (58–59)”
Therefore, the process of fire is not only the flame, but also the heat, which releases those flammable gases, creating further heat. It is both a self-creating and a self-destructive process. I really like this description, if only because it suggests that under the right conditions, everything is potentially flammable, and therefore that our world may be a bit more fragile than we first supposed. Second, Valliant depicts fire as a living thing. This comes through both in the name of the 2016 wildfire, ‘The Beast,’ but also in how fire, as he describes it, has many of the traits we associate with life. It grows, dies, adapts to conditions, travels, and generates offspring (68).
Even though Fire Weather is about a specific 2016 wildfire in Northern Alberta, the book describes wildfires more generally and how the effects of climate change are already in the here-and-now. Vaillant describes fire as an all-consuming beast, in that fire only cares about satisfying its gluttony all while encircling and trapping its prey; an insatiable animal that consumes to the point of self-destruction. Vaillant then compares contemporary society and the oil industry to fire, making the point that we are consuming resources to the point of disastrous climate change and beyond. We are, the book argues, a fire-obsessed culture. We use fire for all sorts of regular activities, like auto combustion and gas stoves, such that we have also taken on some traits of fire, and now face the potential of self-devastation.
“In this way, corporations and wildfires follow similar growth patterns in that, once they reach a certain size, they are able to dictate their own terms across a landscape — even if it destroys the very ecosystem that enabled them to grow so powerful in the first place. (32–33)”
One thing which I appreciate about this book is that it describes contemporary society as irrational and closely connected to fire. In a way, this makes the Fort McMurray case study so interesting. It is the intersection between fire, fossil fuel extraction, capital, retail consumption, and urban planning. The Beast wasn’t just notable because it was a big fire, but because it took place in Fort McMurray, bringing the future threat of climate change into the present moment of fossil fuel extraction. Although Vaillant never goes directly for an anti-capitalist model in the book, there are some strong, albeit indirect, criticisms.
I think that Vaillant is aware of a potential audience for this book in the oil industry (and also with Albertans more generally who remember and were impacted by The Beast), and therefore, does his best to talk with and relate to industry workers, and not directly critiquing the capitalism system too much. While not going so far as to advocate for socialism, he is critical of consumerist society (describing things that people bought in flammable terms) and how the oil sector knew about the potential of climate change but pushed ahead with fossil fuel extraction anyhow. What I mean is, Vaillant, after describing fire and how it works, links those capitalist and fossil fuel elements to something he calls ‘wildfire economics.’ I think that that is a very subtle way to introduce a critique of capitalism (describing fire, and then linking it to capitalism) without alienating a potential audience.
“‘Growing,’ in this case, is a synonym for burning (more product, more money, bigger markets, but also life and forward motion), and it captures perfectly the no-tomorrow ‘ethos’ of wildfire and of wildfire economics. (274)”
And perhaps that subtlety ties into the tone of the book. The image and feeling I got while reading was of one of those hiking/travelogs, where the writer goes off into wilderness, enjoys being lost in nature, and writes about their reflections. Everything has a very personal sense to it, and he focuses on making you feel like you are right there with them, feeling the flames and its burning destruction. It is a specialized kind of writing, much like independent and masculine writing of John Steinbeck. This also means that the book is very focused on geographic locality. Vaillant describes the forests around Fort McMurray and human relation to nature. He is critical of how often people move to a place, treating cities as interchangeable, without consideration of what makes the local ecosystem different and unique.
“The decadal and centennial cycles shaping the boreal forest are rarely considered by city planners or elected officials, not only because their terms (not to mention their memories and lives) are too short, but also because their knowledge of this colonized landscape is incomplete. Virtually everyone who came here to settle this country arrived from far away, often from very different environments. To this day, most newcomers are focused less on the landscape than on what they can take from it. (99)”
Speaking of memory, Vaillant discusses something called the Lucretius Problem (179). It is basically the idea that we make decisions based on past experience. For example, if we have only experienced wildfires of a certain size, even though we rationally know that future wildfires may be bigger than any we’ve previously experienced, we will still prepare for it like we did with fires we are familiar with. Or in other words, when encountering something unprecedented on a personal level, we struggle to adequately prepare. Even if we hear about something unprecedented happening far away, without experiencing it, we won’t know how to properly deal with it, and it is only after we experience something does it move from abstraction to a comprehension. Natural disasters, like wildfires, have the additional problem of exponential growth. They can become more deadly because we would be dealing with old and incomplete information and may be unable to adapt accordingly (111).
Earlier I wrote that I think this book will come to epitomize the century. Besides the in-depth focus on wildfires as a concept, I think Vaillant’s consideration of how humans respond to a natural disaster of a magnitude they have yet to imagine, is one of the great insights of this book. Combining our propensity to base decisions on past experiences and how disasters exponentially grow, the book indirectly suggests that in the transition period between not fully experiencing the effects of climate change and living in a world where we are constantly living with the effects, there will be considerable suffering as we come across scales of disasters that were previously unimaginable. This, I fear, will be a common motif of the decade; our inability to connect past experience and the needed decision-making choices of the present.
I think that Vaillant, without directly saying it, is also asking people to learn more about their local environments and reevaluate their connection to land. And, I also believe, the closer we are to the local land, the less likely we are to view it in purely extractive terms. Part of the settler-colonialist mindset, which is a foundation of Canada, is to view the world in terms of the extraction of value. In other words, because modern Canada originated as a colony for European powers, extraction, whether of beaver furs, lumber, or bitumen, is welded into our psyche and economic system. We have absorbed a Lockean view of the world that the best use of land is through the extraction of resources, and even when faced with climate change, our political community struggles to develop a reciprocal and sustainable relationship with land, even though we risk increased disasters by maintaining the status quo. Case in point, even though Fort McMurray was burnt down by a wildfire exacerbated by climate change, Canada rebuilt the town in order to better extract more fossil fuel resources. Canada still considers this the best use of land. Although I also want to acknowledge that this is also a housing issue, and not just a resource extraction issue.
Our inability to properly withstand disasters also means that many people will bear the brunt of those disasters and could put people through a crisis of identity. Especially when homes are burnt to the ground, and with it, those possessions which symbolize our struggles through the years. For example, if you spent years to make enough money to build a house, and the house is burnt down, it will make the hours of work seem pointless, but it will also unmoor you from what you have done and what you strive to be.
“Home is our memory palace, and there is an existential cruelty in the razing of it. To burn them down by the hundreds and thousands, as wildfires are doing now across the western U.S. and Canada, is a brutal affront to the order we live by, and to the communities and habitats that give our life meaning. Their loss shocks the heart like a sudden death. (322)”
There is a particularly heartbreaking section where Paul Ayearst, a local millwright, describes how the fire took his familial possessions, which captures how some items are irreplaceable and that when they are utterly consumed, identity and heritage can be erased.
“Ayearst’s mother had been the family historian, and, before she died, she had entrusted her eldest son with all the information she had gathers, going back for generations — ‘stuff from the 1800s,’ Ayearst said, ‘passed on to the oldest of all the families.’ He took his charge seriously and had stored the precious documents in his safe, but not even the safe was safe from the fire. Nothing was. Every artifact of his existence was gone. (191)”
Besides the loss of those heritage items, I can’t help but imagine that there must be additional emotional damage in feeling that you lost something that was entrusted to you by your mother. Although I wished that Vaillant went into this theme more, I’m glad that he still brought up the topic of identity. Identity is often something abstract and hard to describe, so by linking it to possessions and a house, and having it turned into ash, I think he grounds it in a way which makes it clear for most readers.
Although it is tragic that so many people lost near everything, if there is one thing that we can be grateful for, it is that there was an orderly retreat from Fort McMurray and no-one died from the wildfire (there were two deaths from an auto collision).
“What would astonish people later, in addition to the bravery of police and first responders who helped guide the evacuation, was the relative order that drivers maintained as they crept along, bumper to bumper, with children and dogs whimpering in the back seats and many in tears themselves, while sparks and firebrands rained won on them, flaring and rattling off their hoods and windshields. This kind of civic-minded restraint and courage was the norm, not the exception, and the many dashcam videos taken that day bear this out. (131)”
Fort McMurray is a place famous for its rugged individualism, so for its residents to engage in an orderly retreat, despite the flames on either side of the road, is remarkable. Even though people likely thought that they could get a personal advantage by ignoring lines, no-one did, which reminds me of the central claim of the book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit. Solnit argues that even though the mainstream and establishment view of society is that when a disaster strikes, order and decency break down and the people need to be protected from themselves by force, in actuality, people are more likely to support each other. Despite this being a story of a fire that breached people’s expectations and destroyed a city, there is still something incredibly hopeful about how people overcame their fear to evacuate together.
The last section of the book, called Reckoning, is about the history of climate science and how fossil fuel companies knew about the science of climate change, but responded with more extraction and a disinformation campaign for the sake of their profits. It’s interesting to me that Vaillant ends on this chapter, because a lot of this information is backgrounder, and provides context for the industrial history of Alberta and for the Beast. Chronologically, and in terms of setting the stage, I would have assumed that this section would belong at the beginning of the book. The section, despite feeling a bit disconnected, is also a call to action, asking us to take what we learned and apply our anger to the culpable. I suspect that given the potential audience of oil industry workers, this book is leading up to the idea that oil companies and governments are responsible for climate change, and a wildfire at Fort McMurray is just the best conduit to tell that story for the audience. I think that for people who read a lot of climate literature, such as The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy That Stole Our Chance of Stopping Climate Change by Geoff Dembicki or This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein, the last section of Fire Weather rehashes a lot of old ground, but at the same time, I don’t think many oil workers would have picked up those other provocative titles, so I can’t hate on it too much.
In the end, this is a well written story about fires and our fire obsessed society that is trying to do the double work of reaching out directly to the people most at risk from wildfires, and who live in countries, provinces, states, or communities that directly depend on and benefit from fossil fuel extraction.
Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Knopf Canada, 2023.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Penguin Books, 2020.
Dembicki, Geoff. The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2022.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
